Authors: Daniel Diehl
‘Vampirism.’ He muttered so quietly Davenport could hardly hear him. ‘Vampirism. Cannibalism.’ Davenport took his coat off and sat down again. It was going to be a long night.
Once Marc began talking the words came tumbling out faster and faster. He described all four killings. He talked about the drugs and he talked about the voices in his head that were threatening to kill him if he didn’t comply with their demands. At one point he looked Davenport straight in the eye and asked him if he would mind if he took a few bites out of the detective’s leg. Davenport thought it was Marc’s way of trying to break the tension, but later FBI profiler Candice DeLong said she believed Sappington was being completely serious.
While Sappington’s statement and formal confession were still being typed up, detectives went to the juvenile detention centre where Armando Gaitan was being held and questioned him again. When they told him everything Sappington had confessed to, he finally broke down. Yes, it was Marc who had wielded the AK-47 that had killed David Mashak. Now connected with more than three murders, Marc Sappington was officially listed as a serial killer and once the news hit the papers and television it didn’t take long for him to be dubbed ‘The Kansas City Cannibal’.
The nature of Sappington’s crimes, and his claims to have heard voices in his head, made it obvious to police, the court and the prosecutor’s office that they were dealing with a very disturbed young man. Consequently, when he was not being held at the Wyandotte County Jail he was undergoing psychiatric evaluation. The psychiatrists prescribed drugs for his psychotic condition, but unless he was in hospital and under constant supervision he refused to take them, complaining that they made him feel tired. Dodging his medication whenever possible, his mental state fluctuated wildly from nearly normal to severely delusional. Under such conditions, an effective evaluation was well-nigh impossible. About the only thing the psychiatrists and prosecutor’s office had agreed upon by the time Sappington’s preliminary hearing came up in January 2002 was that he was not responsible enough for his actions to be given the
death penalty. In the meantime, a sanity hearing was set for 13 September. When the appointed day arrived the only thing the judge and doctors could decide was that another sanity hearing would have to be held after further evaluations and testing.
The problem was that Marc Sappington’s psychological profile flew in the face of almost every known fact about serial killers and cannibals. With one single exception, that of Wayne Williams, every known serial killer in American history had been white; Sappington was black. Serial killers almost never begin their killing until they are in their thirties and there was almost always a history of violence, usually sexual violence, before their killing spree began; Sappington was only twenty-one, had no history of sexual violence and, with one or two minor, drug-related exceptions, had never even been in trouble with the law. Finally, those serial killers who practise cannibalism and drink human blood invariably do so for sexual gratification. Despite repeated, in-depth psychological examinations, Sappington gave no indication that he received any form of sexual gratification from his vampiristic and cannibalistic acts; he insisted that he did what he did only because he was terrified of disobeying the voices. Marc Sappington was, in fact, unique in the annals of criminal psychology.
Faced with this conundrum, the prosecutors’ office insisted that Sappington’s acts were not the result of a psychosis but of his drug use, a factor which he could have controlled – through professional help – had he wanted to. With this in mind, even though they knew they were barred from requesting the death penalty, they sought four consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
At the second sanity hearing, psychiatrist William Logan testified that so long as Sappington refused his medication he would remain a danger to himself and to others. Even
Sappington’s attorney, Patricia Kalb, admitted that her client frequently refused his medication. Based on Logan’s opinion and the supporting evidence of doctors and Ms Kalb, Judge Dexter Burdette issued a ruling, based on a recent decision by the US Supreme Court, instructing the Wyandotte County Sheriff ’s Department to forcibly medicate Sappington. It was to be one of the first times in the history of American jurisprudence that a person would stand trial while being forcibly medicated.
The trial itself was rather anti-climactic. The physical evidence and the accused’s confession spoke for themselves. There was no doubt that Marc Sappington had done the horrible things he was accused of doing. On 26 July 2004, Marc Sappington was found guilty on four counts of murder as well as kidnapping and aggravated burglary in connection with the car he had hijacked when fleeing from the police. Six weeks later, on 2 September, he was sentenced to life in prison with no hope of parole. Although Marc Sappington is safely locked up, he leaves us with a gnawing question. Why? What was it that turned this sweet, friendly kid into a vicious killer and a cannibal? Tens of thousands of people suffer from psychosis and never even contemplate such crimes. Millions of people are trapped in the self-defeating spiral of drugs and crime, but they don’t eat people. So what really happened to Marc Sappington? We may never know.
Twenty
A Rising Tide of Flesh Eaters? The Future of Cannibalism
H
aving looked at cannibalism in the distant past, as well as recounting fifteen specific instances of cannibalism that have taken place over the past six hundred years, it seems both fitting and necessary to project the future of how we perceive – and, in some cases, indulge in – mankind’s ultimate taboo.
Readers may have noticed that the incidence of individual cases covered in this book has occurred at ever-shortening intervals of time. This is due to several factors. First, because many early cases may have gone unreported and, until the twentieth century, some may have been considered simply too horrible to become public knowledge. It is equally true that we wanted to keep the book as current as possible and space constraints simply made it impossible to cover every historical case we found. Indeed, we have accumulated sufficient data to write a second volume on case histories of cannibalism. But over and above these factors there would appear to be a frightening amount of evidence indicating that the phenomenon of cannibalism is on the rise. Is this, in fact, the case or does it only seem so?
For a variety of reasons, some known, some only speculated at, the republics of the former Soviet Union seem to be experiencing an unprecedented plague of cannibalism. At the end of the chapter on André Chikatilo we mentioned that since Chikatilo’s capture the city of Rostov-on-Don has become the
world’s capital of serial killing, but the problem is much more pervasive than that. Russia and its near neighbours have a long and continuing history of people eating.
The rampant cannibalism that took place during the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s was mentioned in chapter one and the chapter on André Chikatilo, but this was not the first famine leading to cannibalism in that part of the world. It was not even the first such incident in the twentieth century. A decade and a half earlier, as the Russian Civil War continued to rage between Lenin’s Red Army and the republican forces of the White Army, the Volga region experienced a similar disastrous famine that led to almost identical results. Reduced to mass starvation, the people had no choice but to eat their own dead or watch their children perish. Later, during the Second World War, Nazi Germany laid siege to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and Stalingrad (now Volgograd) with such ferocity that millions died over the course of the onslaught, which lasted for nearly three years. Again, the living had no choice but to eat their dead or die themselves. Even faced with this awful option, in Leningrad alone well over a million people perished. Still, other nations have suffered unspeakably in wars and famines and not succumbed to cannibalism. Why the Russian states? And more to the immediate point, why is it still happening now?
Certainly, since the break-up of the Soviet Union the social, political and economic structure of the former Soviet states has all but collapsed. The resulting economic crisis has made meat, and, in many cases, any decent food, a luxury that few can afford. In consequence, large segments of the population have sought to drown their sorrows and hunger pangs in a sea of cheap vodka. As it has always done, drinking breaks down the inhibitions and chronic drinking breaks down the cognitive reasoning ability of the brain. When alcohol damage is great enough, and the hunger is severe enough, social and moral strictures collapse.
Russian criminologists admit that the wave of serial killings and cannibalism is directly connected to the economic and social trauma of the area and recognise the severity of the problem. ‘We have information about cases where human flesh is sold in street markets; also when homeless people kill each other and sell the flesh. Every month we find corpses with missing body parts,’ says one Russian criminologist who prefers not to be identified. But can a starvation economy account for the fact that more than thirty cases of cannibalism were prosecuted in the former Soviet states in 1996 alone? A few examples, listed chronologically, may serve to illustrate the extent of the problem:
1996
Until he was caught in St Petersburg, Ilshat Kuzikov marinated choice cuts of human flesh with onions, which he hung in a plastic bag outside his window. When police forced their way into his home, he offered them some of the meat and vodka if they would let him go. Ilshat, thirty-seven, said he became a cannibal because he couldn’t buy enough to eat on his $20 a month pension.
A man in the Siberian coal-mining town of Kemerovo was arrested after killing and cutting up a friend, and using his flesh as the filling for pelmeni – a Russian version of ravioli. Any pelmeni he did not eat himself he sold in the local street market.
In March 1996 police in Sebastopol found the butchered remains of three members of the same family. In the kitchen of the apartment they discovered the internal organs of two victims in saucepans and, nearby on a plate, a freshly roasted piece of human meat.
During the winter of 1996/7, Vladimir Nikolayev, thirty-eight, was arrested for eating two people in the town of Novocheboksary. Nikolayev, a known criminal, was being arrested on an unrelated charge when police found a pan of roasted human meat on the stove and another in the oven. More body parts were found frozen in the snow on Nikolayev’s balcony.
1998
In a supposed effort to rid Russia of the decadence of democracy, Sasha Spesivtsev, twenty-seven, killed and devoured at least 19 street children. Luring the starving children home with him, Spesivtsev killed and butchered them with the help of his mother.
1999
A man from the town of Perm Oblast took a package of meat he had purchased at the local street market to the police when his wife found remnants of human skin clinging to the flesh. The police traced the meat to two men who admitted killing and butchering their drinking partner. Before selling the meat on the street, they carved off the best cuts for themselves. One of the men’s mothers cooked it up and shared it with the lads. The men insisted they only did it because of the high cost of normal meat.
In the semi-autonomous state of Kyargystan, Nikoli Dzhurmongaliev was captured after having killed as many as 100 women, serving many of them to dinner guests. When arrested, Dzhurmongaliev pointed out that two women could provide enough good cuts to feed him for a week.
On New Year’s Eve, 1999/2000, Alexander Zapiantsev from the industrial city of Chelabinsk, in the Ural Mountains, invited the entire population of his apartment building to a feast. The meat at the dinner came from Valdemar Suzik, one of Zapiantsev’s drinking buddies.
2000
Anatoly Dolbyshev, from the Ural town of Berezniki, was arrested for having murdered a friend of his mother and sold the meat at a local street market.
2002
In the town of Manturovo, on the Volga, Valentina Dolbilina, a 36-year-old mother, and Vitaly Bezrodnov, a 26-year-old factory worker, were arrested for killing and eating one of their drinking partners. Dolbilina, Bezrodnov and three others had become nearly comatose when Bezrodnov decided he was hungry. Together, he and Dolbilina chose among their unconscious friends. After dispatching the tastiest-looking one with an axe, they hacked off 15lb of choice cuts and started frying them up. One of their companions, who had wandered off to bed, was aroused by the smell and came to join them, little realising that he was eating his own brother.
Police in the Ukrainian town of Zhytomyr arrested two men and a woman for killing and eating a suspected six people as part of a series of satanic rituals. They were caught while trying to extort a ransom from the family of one of their victims.
2003
On two separate occasions convicts in Russia’s overcrowded prisons were caught killing and eating fellow inmates.
Andrei Maslich, twenty-four, held at a local prison in Barnual, was caught twice committing acts of cannibalism, later claiming he was just bored and wanted to visit Moscow, where he thought he would be sent for psychiatric examination if he ate someone.
In the Semipalatinsk prison in Kazakhstan, four convicts decided to eat the next new prisoner to come into their cell block. Later, they claimed they were motivated by newspaper articles describing cannibalism in prisons.